COUNCIL OF ATHABASCAN TRIBAL GOVERNMENTS box 126 • alaska 99740 · or (907) 662-2587 (907) 662-2581 p.o. fort yukon, COUNCIL OF ATHABASCAN TRIBAL GOVERNMENTS box 126 • fort yukon, alaska 99740 · (907) 662-2587 or (907) 662-2581 p.o. ORGANIZATIONAL BACKGROUND SUMMARY The Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments (CATG) is a consortium of 10 tribal governments in the Yukon Flats, a 10,000 square mile region in the Northern Interior of Alaska partially above the Arctic Circle. We are about 1,250 people in number and live in nine small Gwichin Athabascan Indian villages scattered over the Flats and along the Yukon River. We make our living by hunting, fishing, and trapping. Seasonal jobs like fire fighting and construction supplement our subsistence activities but the per capita income falls at least a third below the poverty level in the United States. Unemployment is about 80% with a resulting dependence on welfare payments and, many of the state and federal programs that we had come to rely on have been cut with the resulting recurring cycle of economic recession. There is no stable locally controlled economy in the Yukon Flats. The communities are being developed from the outside. We are dependent on state and federal welfare or handout programs. Our subsistence economy is under constant threat because we have no control over its regulation nor the payment we receive for our natural resources. This threat is expressed in the following excerpts from seven Economic Development conferences, meetings, and workshops that have been held in the Yukon Flats since September 1985: "The control has been taken away from us and we need to regain it. "...we have to have the land under protection so that we can continue in. "Like Simon here it's tighter and he was raised up there in the canyon up the Porcupine and he couldn't even go around the bend and build himself a CATG cabin where he wants to. He had to get a permit and it took him a long time just to get that permit to build himself a cabin. Now, when that starts happening, that means that it's going to be happening to the "After 1991, there's a good possibility they're going to start taxing all our land and, if they do that, we're going to have to sell a chunk of land to pay taxes on the rest of the land and, eventually, we won't have any land left. The cash economy is here in our natural resources - we're just not using it and we're going to have to do it." "One of the things that I would like to see is further development of it's that responsibility has "It's not something that we're after responsibility to our community We always leave it to somebody is what we're really trying to do. we leave our responsibilities up to somebody else. I think it's time that we take control of our own Since the CATG first met to try to alleviate some of the conditions |